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Afghanistan: A warlord Hekmatyar claimed the ambush against the French KABUL - The Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar claimed responsibility for the ambush in which ten French soldiers were killed near Kabul on August 18 and acknowledged the death of ten of its own fighters in this battle, in a video received Monday by a private news agency Afghan. The attack had previously been claimed by the Taliban, which form a separate group Hezb-e-Islami (Islamic party, HIG) to Hekmatyar. On 18 August, a French patrol fell into an ambush mounted by 140 to 170 well-armed insurgents in the valley Uzbeen...

WASHINGTON, April 7, 2008 – Afghan and coalition security forces operating in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province cleared Kendal and Shok villages of insurgents and captured several suspects yesterday, military officials reported, while coalition troops and Afghan police seized two militants in operations in Khowst province. The combined Afghan-U.S. force repelled the attack with accurate small-arms fire and crew-served weapons. During the long battle, the insurgents reinforced their positions in several compounds with large groups of fighters. Close-air support was called upon to dislodge the heavily armed insurgents from their reinforced defensive positions. After neutralizing the threat, the combined force detained numerous...

 A federal grand jury in Kansas City has issued a new indictment against an Islamic charity based in Columbia---and has added a former Michigan congressman to the list of people indicted.The new indictment accuses the Islamic American Relief Agency and several former officers of of engaging in prohibited financial transactions for the benefit of a terrorist. The indictment charges former Michigan Congressman Mark Deli Siljander with money laundering, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice.Federal officials say the charity sent money to Pakistan to benefit a man designated by the United States as a global terrorist. The prosecutor says the man had...

Ex-Lawmaker Charged in Terror Conspiracy Jan 16 02:42 PM US/Eastern By LARA JAKES JORDAN Associated Press Writer 19 Comments WASHINGTON (AP) - A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan. The former Republican congressman from Michigan, Mark Deli Siljander, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to...

A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.

Former Michigan congressman Siljander indicted by Gazette Staff and News Service Reports Wednesday January 16, 2008, 4:41 PM Gazette fileFormer U.S. Rep. Mark Deli Siljander A former Kalamazoo-area congressman was indicted Wednesday for his part in an alleged terrorist fundraising ring that is accused of sending more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan. Mark Siljander, a former Three Rivers resident who represented southwestern Michigan from 1981-87, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He allegedly lied about lobbying senators...

The deadliest suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan’s history killed over 30 people and wounded well over 100 in the peaceful northern province of Baghlan. VIP’s, including a Parliamentary Financial Committee, were visiting a sugar factory in New Baghlan, close to the larger Pul-i-Kumri city, when the blast occurred. At this hour, the city is still in the throws of carnage and chaos. The body count has fluctuated widely since the attack occurred early this morning and local officials say it may take days to pick through the burnt bodies and rubble before an accurate number is acquired. Sayed Mustafa...

AFGHAN REBEL LEADER HEKMATYAR SAYS ENDS INSURGENCY -STATEMENT

Excerpt - DUBAI (AFP) - Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is still alive but keeping a low is still alive but keeping a low profile, notorious Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said in a video released on Arab television. "According to my information I think that Osama is still alive," Hekmatyar said in the video broadcast by Al-Arabiya television late Sunday. He said Bin Laden, wanted by the United States over the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, would be better off "not multiplying his appearances in the media or in publishing statements and videos." Hekmatyar earlier this...

KABUL: Afghanistan’s insurgency is cheap to fund and the fighters behind it are committed, so it could continue “for a long time” without foreign support, fugitive rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has said. Roadside bombs, which Taliban and other insurgents use regularly to deadly effect, cost $100 a time, the former prime minister said in a recorded DVD response to questions that was delivered this week. This is much less expensive than the billion of dollars spent by international troops conducting counter-insurgency operations. “The Americans know that a roadside bomb against one of their convoys would cost only $100,” said Hekmatyar,...

Excerpt - KABUL, Afghanistan - A lawmaker who briefly served as prime minister during Afghanistan's civil war was shot and killed outside him home in Kabul on Wednesday. Abdul Saboor Farid, a member of Afghanistan's upper house of parliament, was prime minister for one month in 1992 when the country plunged into a bitter civil war following the defeat of the Soviet army by the U.S.-backed mujahedeen fighters. He was killed outside his house in northern Kabul, said Gen. Zulmay Khan, Kabul province's deputy police chief. ~ snip ~

Excerpt - KARACHI, Pakistan - Fugitive Afghan rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar told The Associated Press his forces have ended cooperation with the Taliban and suggested that he was open to talks with embattled President Hamid Karzai. In a video response to questions submitted by AP, Hekmatyar also recounted how U.S. forces nearly caught him on two occasions but he got away. Hekmatyar, speaking in front of a plain white wall at an undisclosed location, indicated that his group contacted Taliban leaders some time in 2003 and agreed to wage a joint jihad, or holy war, against American troops. "The jihad...

Afghan Warlord Says He Helped Bin Laden Escape Tora Bora Thursday, January 11, 2007 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said in a television interview broadcast Thursday that his fighters helped Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden escape intense U.S. bombing in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001. Hekmatyar, a former Afghan prime minister and leader of the Hezb-e-Islami militant group, told Pakistan's private Geo TV network that when the United States began its assault on the rugged Afghan mountains five years ago, some of his fighters moved bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and other associates to...

Pakistan (AP) - In a rare video message, Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar claims that American troops will be forced out of Afghanistan like the Soviets before them. The leader of the Hezb-e-Islami militant group also touts the Republican Party defeat in last month's U.S. midterm elections as a victory for militants fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. "It seems that every bullet that mujahedeen had fired toward the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan has turned into a vote against Bush," Hekmatyar said in the undated video statement received by Associated Press Television in Pakistan. "There is no doubt that is...

AL-QAEDA leader Osama bin Laden, reported last week to have died, is alive and hiding in Afghanistan, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview published in The Times today. "It's not a hunch,'' Musharraf said. Afghanistan's eastern "Kunar province borders on Bajaur Agency. We know there are some pockets of al-Qaida in Bajaur Agency. We have set a good intelligence organisation. We have moved some army elements. We did strike them twice there. We located and killed a number of them there.'' Pakistan's military ruler also suggested links between bin Laden and Afghan warlord and former Afghan prime minister...

Ahmed Shah Masood (c. 1953–September 9, 2001) (variant transliterations include Ahmad, Massoud, etc.) was a Kabul University engineering student turned Afghan military leader who played a leading role in driving the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, earning him the nickname Lion of Panjshir. Various transliterations include: Ahmad / Ahmed / Akhmad / Achmad, Shah / Schah / Chah, Massoud / Massud / Massood / Mas’ud. Ahmad Shah Massoud was born 10.06.1332 (01.09.1953)[2] in Jangalak[3]/ Panjsher[5]as son of police commander Dost Mohammad Khan. At the age of five, he started grammar school at Bazarak and stayed there until second grade....

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Reported Captured The commander of Hezb-i-Islami and al-Qaeda ally detained during a raid in eastern Afghanistan On the day of the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attack, Coalition forces score a high value target in Afghanistan. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the commander of Hezb-i-Islami and ally of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, has been captured during a joint U.S. and Afghan Army raid in “eastern Afghanistan.” Hekmatyar, contrary to his rhetoric gave up to the Coalition forces without a fight. Hekmatyar's arrest is said to be part of an 'ongoing operation.' Hekmatyar has been designated by the U.S. Department of State...

An Afghan warlord wanted by the United States said in a videotape broadcast Thursday that he and his followers want to support Osama bin Laden in battle. "We hope to participate with them in a battle that they lead. They hold the banner and we stand alongside them as supporters," Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said in the tape broadcast by the Al-Jazeera satellite network. The tape appeared less than two weeks after top Islamist militants, including bin Laden, issued messages in quick succession. Bin Laden, his No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri and the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, weighed...

Hekmatyar wants to fight under the command of Ben Laden - the islamist leader Afghan Gulbuddin Hekmatyar stated to want to fight under the command of the chief of terrorist organization Al-Qaïda Usama Bin Laden and his right arm Aymane Zawahiri, in a video recording diffused Thursday by the chain qatariote Al-Jazira. "We hope to take part in a battle that they would lead and of which they would carry the standard, and in which we would line up on their side as partisans", Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in its message pronounced in Arabic declared. Former Afghan Prime Minister and declared...

The 'enemy central' province in Afghanistan By Andrew North And Bilal Sarwary Thu, 22 Dec 2005, 09:32:00 KABUL and KUNAR, Afghanistan -- As the US military's battle to subdue the Taleban and other rebel groups in Afghanistan moves into its fifth year, one eastern province bordering Pakistan has increasingly become a symbol of its difficulties. Despite several major American offensives in Kunar over the past year, the militants keep re-grouping - many of them foreign fighters with al-Qaeda backing. The trouble it has had in this area has led US forces to use psychological operations, or 'psy-ops' tactics, that one...

KABUL, Aug 20 (Reuters) - A former Taliban commander now loyal to the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has been gunned down in the capital, officials said on Saturday. Karim Qarabaghi and his nephew were killed in their car by a hail of bullets fired from a passing four wheel drive vehicle in a northern suburb of Kabul on Friday, they said. Before joining the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, Qarabaghi served as a commander for ex-Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who like the Taliban remnants is leading an insurgency against the government and foreign forces. After the Taliban's...

The last radio contact was an urgent appeal for help. Night was falling, a rainstorm threatening, and four U.S. Navy SEAL commandos were surrounded by about a dozen militants in rugged, wooded mountains. They needed reinforcements. That hurried call set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the U.S. military's deadliest blow in Afghanistan, and the greatest loss of life ever for the elite force of SEALs. Nine days after the ambush and subsequent downing of a U.S. special forces helicopter with 16 troops aboard, U.S military officials in Kabul and Washington are starting to draw...

Mollah Omar and Hekmatyar not excluded from a possible amnesty KABUL - the former leader of the talibans, mollah Mohammad Omar, and the former Prime Minister and chief of war Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are not excluded from the process of national reconciliation, indicated to Monday to AFP the chief of the Afghan commission of reconciliation, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. "the amnesty includes these two people, who can nothing only make as individuals when everyone around them goes", Mr. Mojaddedi answered concerning mollah Omar and of Hekmatyar, sought by the Americans for "terrorism". The proposal for an amnesty also includes the Afghan prisoners...

War brutalizes man, every afghan bears living testimony to this. If the landscape of Afghanistan bears the craters of the endless war, the political and military leadership in Afghanistan also carries war's indelible scars. It is important never to lose sight of this. Ahmed Shah Mas'ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul's Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas'ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by...

An Afghan warlord who settled in Britain kept a human dog to bite his victims and waged a campaign of kidnap and torture against civilians, the Old Bailey was told yesterday. Faraydi Zardad, a veteran fighter against the Russians and the Taliban, was the commander of soldiers manning checkpoints on the Jalalabad road, the vital supply route between Kabul and Peshawar. He had complete authority in the area between 1992 and 1996 and "had a fearsome reputation for being cruel and merciless", the court was told. In the first prosecution of its kind Zardad, 41, who was arrested while living...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The United States, Britain and Saudi Arabia asked the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday to impose sanctions on British-based Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih for allegedly providing financial and material support to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. The United States and Saudi Arabia also asked the council to impose sanctions on Saudi businessman Adel Abdul Jalil Batterjee, who was instrumental in founding the Benevolence International Foundation, an Islamic charity that the United States has previously deemed a global terrorist group. Council diplomats said the two names were circulated among the 15 Security Council members on Tuesday. If...

Warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is wanted by Washington for terrorism, has distributed a video recording in southern Afghanistan, urging Afghans to wage jihad against America. In the 22-minute speech on a recording filled with graphic images of carnage and violence against Muslims in Indonesia, Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere, Hekmatyar makes a passionate call for holy war. "War in Afghanistan and Iraq is the second crusade war but the only difference is in the first crusade Italy was leading the war and this time it is America," Hekmatyar says on the CD. The video produced by the Abdullah Islamic and Jihadi...

10 Arrested in Afghan Killing of Chinese AMIR SHAH Associated Press KABUL, Afghanistan - Authorities have arrested 10 people in connection with the killing of 11 Chinese workers and found evidence that a warlord wanted by the U.S. military was behind the bloody attack, Afghan officials said Sunday. A $10,000 reward was also offered for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the worst attack on foreign civilians since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Six people were arrested Sunday in Kunduz province, some 150 miles north of the capital, Kabul, and four were earlier detained in...

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan police and international peacekeepers raided a compound Monday in Kabul and arrested eight men with suspected links to al-Qaeda and a group loyal to a banned Afghan warlord, a spokesman said. Among those detained was one man believed to be a senior member of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami group, said Cmdr. Chris Henderson. Henderson would not reveal the names or nationalities of any suspects but said authorities had seized weapons, explosives and documents that showed the suspects had links to both groups.

Canadian Soldiers Help to Capture Terrorism Suspect By PAUL KORING UPDATED AT 10:15 AM EDT Wednesday, Apr. 14, 2004 KABUL -- A high-ranking terrorism suspect has been captured in a late-night raid by a heavily armed joint Afghan-Canadian team, North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials said yesterday in Kabul. "The arrested person was a suspected senior member of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin" and "posed an imminent threat to NATO," said Commander Chris Henderson, a spokesman for the 6,000-strong NATO force deployed in and around Kabul. He would not name the suspect. More than 100 heavily armed Canadian soldiers in armoured vehicles supported Afghan...

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) - Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of America's most-wanted men, has urged his compatriots to rise up against the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. In a statement obtained by The Associated Press on Sunday, Hekmatyar calls for an Afghan uprising in a competitive spirit with Iraq. He welcomed the uprising by supporters of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who have been battling U.S. forces in Iraq. Afghans "like Iraqi mujahedeen, will choose the way of uprising against the occupiers," said the Pashtu-language statement, translated by the AP. Hekmatyar heads Hezb-e-Islami, an Islamic guerrilla faction that fought invading Soviet...

<p>KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Militants attacked a remote U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan with rockets and heavy machine-guns, sparking a battle that killed a bystander, the military said Wednesday. The main American base in the south also came under rocket assault.</p>

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Muslim forces were gathering near a small town in Bosnia, and commanders were moving fighters to the front. The man in charge wanted the very best soldiers available, so he handpicked six of his favorites and ordered them to the area immediately. The mission was indisputably military, but the man calling the shots was not a captain with the army or a general back at command headquarters. He was the person helping finance the battle: Adel Batterjee, a wealthy Saudi businessman aiding the operation 2,000 miles away from his home in Saudi Arabia. This was not...

BIN LADEN 'IN AFGAHANISTAN' Osama bin Lada is alive and living in Afghanistan, according to the country's president Hamid Karzai. It is not known where the al Qaeda is hiding out, but previous reports have put him on the tribal borders with Pakistan. Mr Karzai said that was accurate. His remarks come as Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, a main ally of bin Laden, vowed to continue a holy war against the US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan. The US military in Afghanistan said this week it was confident of capturing bin Laden this year as well as Mullah Omar and...

IN a video recording released today, renegade Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar urged Afghanistan's people to join a jihad, or holy war, against the US-led coalition and to drive "the occupying infidel forces" out of the country. The compact disc, containing a 22-minute speech by Hekmatyar, appeared to be authentic and recently made, since it mentioned current events such as US President George W Bush's visit to Iraq last month and last month's political unrest in Georgia, the former Soviet state. Wearing a simple wool hat and a black jacket, and sitting in front of a gray background in an...

Citing an "unimpeachable source," Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are in Iran, according to a Fox News analyst. Al-Zawahiri was seen within the last two weeks, and bin Laden was spotted in July, says the network's foreign affairs analyst Mansoor Ijaz. The report dovetails with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's announcement last summer that he had sent his own army into the northern tribal areas near the border with Iran to ferret out bin Laden. "That was an extraordinary admission at the time, one that I could not understand how he could make if bin Laden, in...

KABUL (Reuters) - The al Qaeda network has stepped up activity along the Afghan-Pakistan border, opening a "second front" to divert U.S. military resources and attention from Iraq, Afghanistan 's interior minister said Friday. Ali Ahmad Jalali said some recent attacks on U.S. forces, especially in the east of the country, had been carried out by foreign al Qaeda fighters, as opposed to native Taliban militia. Militants killed in clashes on the Afghan and Pakistan sides of the border in recent weeks included Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks and Pakistanis, a sign they were from the network of Saudi-born dissident Osama bin...

<p>Two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, no memorial service, cable-news talkfest or university seminar seemed to have been complete without someone emerging from the woodwork to wonder darkly why the CIA ever financed Usama bin Laden "in the first place."</p>

Ben Laden gets busy to destroy America of the bottom of his cave (media) Oussama Ben Laden, the head of Al-Qaïda gets busy to destroy America since a cave tranformée in HQ from where it gives orders to his partisans everywhere in the world, including in the United States, to believe for it a person in charge for the terrorist network quoted in the Arab press. "Al-Qaïda is everywhere and forces some in the whole world. Ben Laden directs it since a cave, this same cave from where the orders had left to destroy the citadel of the Pentagon...

Beware the Maulana! B Raman | | July 23, 2003 | 13:43 IST Controversial Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman's high-profile visit to India and the attention accorded to him in governmental and non-governmental circles in New Delhi are being viewed by many India-watchers in the US with bewilderment and concern.Rahman is a fundamentalist with a difference, known for his proximity to Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People's Party. Despite his fundamentalist orientation, he supported her right to become prime minister and opposed the Jamaat-e-Islami campaign in the 1990s against a woman heading the government of an Islamic country.Benazir rewarded...

After a recent series of crushing blows there are indications that Al-Qaeda may now find it difficult to continue operating as an effective terrorist organisation. Despite the failure to capture Osama Bin Laden, right, or his deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, more than 3,000 members or associates of the organisation have been captured during the past 18 months, writes Nick Fielding. According to the annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report, published by the US State Department last week, international terrorist attacks declined sharply in 2002, to the lowest level since 1969. Attacks on the United States, or on American property abroad,...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -With the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, one of the most wanted men in Afghanistan, renegade commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, promised President Bush "thousands of Osama bin Ladens." "After the collapse of Baghdad, people think that the war in Iraq has come to an end, but another, guerrilla war, shall begin from this moment on," he warned in five-page Pashtu-language message acquired Thursday by The Associated Press. The message, delivered in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar by a member of Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami party, warned of fresh suicide attacks and called the U.S.-led victory over Saddam...

Strong explosion close to the embassy from the United States in Kabul A strong explosion was heard in the east of Kabul, close to the embassy of the United States late in the night of Sunday, according to a correspondent of the AFP. Military ambulances and vehicles moved towards the district of the embassy little after the explosion. One was unaware of in the immediate future if there were victims. This explosion intervenes two weeks after an attack with the rocket against the headquarters of the international Force of assistance to safety in Afghanistan (ISAF).

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Amid stepped up attacks in Afghanistan, the Taliban's elusive leader Mullah Mohammed Omar has issued a fresh call for a holy war against U.S. troops and Afghans who work with them. His latest decree, released in posters widely displayed in eastern Afghanistan, carries the signatures of 600 Islamic clerics reminding the faithful of their duty to wage jihad, or holy war. "Whenever the non-Muslims attack a Muslim land it is the duty of everyone to rise up against the aggressor," black-and-white poster reportedly written by Omar said. "We were blamed for Osama bin Laden because...

KABUL, Afghanistan, Mar 30, 2003 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- A powerful explosion rattled the Afghan capital of Kabul late Sunday. It was not immediately know what caused the blast or whether there were any casualties. Sleeping residents in the posh Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood were awakened by the roar of the explosion. Ambulance sirens could be heard and police were investigating. The capital is patrolled by nearly 5,000 international peacekeepers, but there have been frequent attacks in recent months blamed on Taliban fugitives, loyalists of renegade rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and al-Qaida. Copyright 2003 Associated Press, All rights...

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan - Two U.S. special forces soldiers were killed and another was wounded Saturday when armed motorcyclists swept down on a reconnaissance patrol in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province. At least three Afghan soldiers also were wounded, a military spokesman said. Afghan officials said Taliban fighters who still are active in the area were behind the incident. The U.S. soldiers, escorted by Afghan troops, had been at the opening of a new school and hospital, built with American aid, about 200 miles west of Kandahar. The attackers escaped. It was the latest reminder that the war in...

KARACHI - When the dust settles in Iraq, it could simply be the prelude to a much longer and less defined war involving any number of militant groups in addition to al-Qaeda . These new battles against the interests of the US and its allies can be expected to be of two types. The first will involve planned attacks by militant organizations such as al-Qaeda ; the second will be independent assaults perpetrated by disgruntled elements drawn from the masses of the Muslim world. There is no dispute that the US has the overwhelming military might to crush Saddam Hussein...

AMERICAN forces are racing to foil a plot by Osama Bin Laden to destabilise Afghanistan planned to coincide with a US-led attack on Iraq. The interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda operations chief captured last weekend, confirmed American and Afghan intelligence that Bin Laden has teamed up with one of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. FBI agents and special forces are scouring the villages of South Waziristan, a remote region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the two fugitives are believed to have been planning their onslaught. They have also moved to block the port of Gwadr on Pakistan’s...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Afghan rebel commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said he is proud the United States has branded him a terrorist and echoed Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s call for suicide attacks against Americans, according to a statement obtained Sunday by The Associated Press. Calling the United States the "big Satan of the world," Hekmatyar, a former Afghan prime minister, also vowed jihad against U.S. troops in Afghanistan (news - web sites). American forces are combing parts of eastern Afghanistan for Hekmatyar, his loyalists and Taliban and al-Qaida fugitives. "I am thankful to Almighty God that the United States...

ISLAMABAD: The United States has declared Pashtun Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as a global terrorist and ordered to freeze his worldwide assets. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Wednesday notified the declaration to all the interested countries, organisations and parties that, it is effective from February 18. The declaration obtained by The News says that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's name has been added to the list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. Specifying different spellings of his name, the declaration gave his last known address in Iran. He has been included in the...